Judges 15:1-20 - Defeat in Heaps and Heaps

Judges 15:1-20

Samson Defeats the Philistines

1 After a while, in the time of wheat harvest, it happened that Samson visited his wife with a young goat. And he said, “Let me go in to my wife, into her room.” But her father would not permit him to go in.

2 Her father said, “I really thought that you thoroughly hated her; therefore I gave her to your companion. Is not her younger sister better than she? Please, take her instead.”

3 And Samson said to them, “This time I shall be blameless regarding the Philistines if I harm them!” 4 Then Samson went and caught three hundred foxes; and he took torches, turned the foxes tail to tail, and put a torch between each pair of tails. 5 When he had set the torches on fire, he let the foxes go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, as well as the vineyards and olive groves.

6 Then the Philistines said, “Who has done this?”

And they answered, “Samson, the son-in-law of the Timnite, because he has taken his wife and given her to his companion.” So the Philistines came up and burned her and her father with fire.

7 Samson said to them, “Since you would do a thing like this, I will surely take revenge on you, and after that I will cease.” 8 So he attacked them hip and thigh with a great slaughter; then he went down and dwelt in the cleft of the rock of Etam.

9 Now the Philistines went up, encamped in Judah, and deployed themselves against Lehi. 10 And the men of Judah said, “Why have you come up against us?”

So they answered, “We have come up to arrest Samson, to do to him as he has done to us.”

11 Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, “Do you not know that the Philistines rule over us? What is this you have done to us?”

And he said to them, “As they did to me, so I have done to them.”

12 But they said to him, “We have come down to arrest you, that we may deliver you into the hand of the Philistines.”

Then Samson said to them, “Swear to me that you will not kill me yourselves.”

13 So they spoke to him, saying, “No, but we will tie you securely and deliver you into their hand; but we will surely not kill you.” And they bound him with two new ropes and brought him up from the rock.

14 When he came to Lehi, the Philistines came shouting against him. Then the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him; and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that is burned with fire, and his bonds broke loose from his hands. 15 He found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached out his hand and took it, and killed a thousand men with it. 16 Then Samson said:

“With the jawbone of a donkey,
Heaps upon heaps,
With the jawbone of a donkey
I have slain a thousand men!”

17 And so it was, when he had finished speaking, that he threw the jawbone from his hand, and called that place Ramath Lehi.

18 Then he became very thirsty; so he cried out to the LORD and said, “You have given this great deliverance by the hand of Your servant; and now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?” 19 So God split the hollow place that is in Lehi, and water came out, and he drank; and his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he called its name En Hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day. 20 And he judged Israel twenty years in the days of the Philistines.

Samson avenged the loss of his wife at the hands of her father who gave her away and offered him a sister instead.  He enacted his vengeance by tying fox tails together with torches between them and set them loose through the grain fields and vineyards of the Philistines, even consuming their storehouses in his raging fires set upon his enemies.  The enraged Philistines then burned his wife and her father in their own burning rage of vengeance, which was answered by a final slaughter (“hip and thigh with a great slaughter”) of them by Samson for torching his wife and father-in-law.  His own countrymen arrested him out of fear of retaliation by the Philistines and tied him up, yet God gave him the power to easily break free and he grabbed a fresh jawbone of a donkey and killed a thousand men with it.  He waxed lyrical as he pronounced his victory saying, “Heaps upon heaps with the jawbone of a donkey
I have slain a thousand men!”  He then tossed the mocking weapon down on the ground and cried out for God’s mercy to satiate his thirst from all that effort.  He lived afterwards to judge Israel for twenty years among the occupying Philistine enemies before meeting an unseemly death yet with a final blow of vengeance on them to come.  He was used to deliver Israel by means that we have a difficult time understanding.  On one hand we know that veng is the LORD’s, not man’s; on the other hand we read that the LORD gave Samson the strength to deliver the people from oppression in what appeared to be his own vengeance but was ultimately God’s in heaps and heaps, up to hip and thigh, as he waded into victory over the enemies of God.